1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods and systems of configuring media units.
2. Background Art
Media providers, such as cable/satellite television, high-speed data, and other servers providers, typically deploy one or more media units to facilitate extending services to their customers. The media units may be transmission related features, such as routers, bridges, hubs, Cable Modem Termination Systems (CMTS), network provisioning units (NPUs), conditional access routers (CARs), and the like. The media units may also be customer related or customer premises equipment, such as settop boxes (STBs), cable modems (CMs), computers, digital or personal video recorders (DVRs, PVRs), media terminal adapters (MTAs), outlet digital adapters (ODAs), and the like.
The use of these and other media units may be dependent on the services provided and the features required to support the operation thereof. The media providers face numerous challenges in supporting systems having such features. Cable providers, for example, may be required to support millions of media units. The support thereof may include monitoring performance, troubleshooting problems and/or malfunctions, installation, configurations etc.
One difficultly with supporting the media units in this manner is that the media providers may be faced with configuring media units from different vendors. For example, in the cable environment, a cable service provider may provide services to STBs of a number of different vendors. Configuring such STBs can be problematic, as each STB may operate according to different protocols and/or procedures.